December 2001
Intermediate to advanced
380 pages
11h 54m
English
Content preview from Python & XMLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Reading an Article
In this example, we look at how we can extract and use information from an XML document using SAX. The particular documents our script works with are simple news articles, but we’ll see how to work with elements, attributes, and textual content.
Some of the trade-offs of using SAX depend on what you’re trying to accomplish, and how the XML is structured. SAX treats XML as a continuous stream, firing events to your handler as they happen. Example 3-1 shows article.xml.
Example 3-1. article.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<webArticle category="news" subcategory="technical">
<header title="NASA Builds Warp Drive"
length="3k"
author="Joe Reporter"
distribution="all"/>
<body>Seattle, WA - Today an anonymous individual
announced that NASA has completed building a
Warp Drive and has parked a ship that uses
the drive in his back yard. This individual
claims that although he hasn't been contacted by
NASA concerning the parked space vessel, he assumes
that he will be launching it later this week to
mount an expedition to the Andromeda Galaxy.
</body>
</webArticle>Example 3-1 contains markup that is structured in a few different ways, and can be interesting to parse via SAX. A document such as article.xml requires that we understand how the document is structured prior to writing a handler to parse it. Therefore, the handler is tightly coupled to the document’s structure.
Writing a Simple Handler
You can write the ArticleHandler class to a new file,
handlers.py; we’ll keep adding ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.